


Matrix

by AndromedaPrime



Series: Yeager Program [1]
Category: Transformers (Bay Movies), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Past Child Death, Species Swap, also Ratchet is now alive in this, past mechpreg, roboCade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-17
Updated: 2014-07-23
Packaged: 2018-02-09 05:30:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1970736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndromedaPrime/pseuds/AndromedaPrime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He was always considered the screw-up of the family, but not even he thought he could screw up <i>this</i> badly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Matrix

**Author's Note:**

> Ratchet has been brought back online for this fic; the method by which he was revived will be explained in a later entry to the series.

He couldn’t sleep.

Sometimes in place of dreams, he had flashbacks about Tessa nearly getting her head shot off by people that worked for a government that was supposed to protect them. Sometimes the flashbacks were about Lucas’s charred corpse still standing in that running pose and hearing Tessa cry out in horror.

Other times it was about everything that he had been through with the Autobots in their war that chased them from Texas to Chicago to China and Hong Kong.

He threw the covers off of his body and got to his feet, grabbing the faded Dallas Cowboys shirt that he’d flung over his desk chair and pulling it over his head. He’d kicked his shoes pretty far underneath the king-sized bed and he wasn’t up for laying on the floor and feeling around for them in the dark, so he walked down the flight of stairs to the first floor and through the kitchen to the door leading out back.

The stars glowed brightly overhead. There was little light pollution in this part of Texas he lived in, where there was no Austin, no San Antonio, no Dallas or Houston to block out the light of the faraway suns. Out here it was merely the stretch of land and the expanse of the sky above.

A familiar silhouette cut into the horizon, sitting on the ground and far, far taller than any human would ever grow. The closer he stepped the louder the sounds of mechanisms and vents working and whirring got. He knew he could hear him step closer, but it wasn’t until Cade was right at the giant mechanical hand that a low voice rumbled softly, “Hello Cade.”

“Staring at the stars?” Cade looked upward in the direction that Optimus had his helm craned up at. “Is there another ‘bot on the way?”

“Not to my knowledge. Looking at the stars provides me with a sense of comfort that not much else does.” He heard the covers of the Prime’s eyes close then reopen before a pair of blue lights looked down at him. “If I may ask, why are you out here?”

“Nightmares. Lots of them.” Cade sighed and sat on the ground next to the Autobot, a small mouse sitting next to a regal lion. “Imagined my daughter with a hole in her head, death in her eyes and blood running down her head through her blonde hair. Something a parent should never have to imagine about their own kids.”

“Something they should never see as well.” Optimus’s vents hissed and he looked away, down at his lap. “I was not lucky that my own child was saved.”

“Bumblebee? But he’s here isn’t he?” Cade asked, eyebrows raised quizzically.

“In that I am lucky. Before Bumblebee, however, I had another.”

The massive hand next to him lifted off the ground and two fingers touched the side of Optimus’s head. His optics went white as he beamed moving pictures on the ground before him and Cade. The human watched with piqued interest, eyes taking in the sight of a small Transformer toddling around. Blue, red, silver with bright blue eyes. The small frame looked up and chirped something in another language.

“Megatron and I once ruled Cybertron as Lord High Protector and Prime. He took charge of the military forces while I oversaw the rest of society; he and I balanced each other out. He was swift with justice whereas I was too lenient at the time, and I calmed him down in his rages.

“When we unearthed an ancient relic from times gone by, Megatron heard the voice of Megatronus Prime, the Fallen Prime. He went insane and betrayed us, the very people he and I swore to protect when we assumed our positions of power.

“A short time after Megatron formed the Decepticons,” Cade heard the hitch in Optimus’s voice and the sigh before the Prime continued, “I learned that I was going to bear a child.”

“You? But… aren’t you a guy?”

“For reasons that are a mystery to every Cybertronian, in the eyes of humans I am considered a male. On Cybertron, however every being, whether they would be considered male or female by your humans, is capable of bearing offspring. I bore a child not very long after, a femme, or a female by your standards, and I named the little one Genesis. She is who you see right now.”

Cade turned his attention back to the tiny Transformer, Genesis, stumbling around on unsteady pedes. He saw large hands he recognized as Optimus’s reach in and lift her off the floor. The tiny face shifted into one of happiness and they held out their little arms.

God, it reminded him of Tessa. How Tessa toddled around and looked up at him with adoration in her eyes, held her arms up to him and babbled baby speak for “Carry me daddy!”

“What happened to her?”

The projection on the ground flickered away and Optimus lowered his helm, optics now a very dimmed color of blue. He sighed heavily. “She passed into the Well of AllSparks not long after the events I let you witness. She took her first steps that solar cycle.”

Cade sighed and placed a hand on the closest piece of armor on the Transformer, which was a bit of hip plate. “I’m so sorry.”

“There is no need to apologize on your part, Cade. You did not take her away from me prematurely. I made certain that those that did,” Cade didn’t miss the way that Optimus’s servos curled into fists, “paid their penance long ago.”

The Texan was tempted to pry further, but his common sense stopped him from doing so. He lifted his hands to his face, held his head in them, and sighed. He watched two bats flitter overhead, steering clear of Optimus, and cleared his throat. “So, I was meaning to ask you this when I was fixin’ you up. When you opened up your chest and I fixed the cracked casing around your spark, I saw something.”

Optimus looked down at the human man and absently placed a servo over his chassis, optic ridges quirking upward. “What was it that you saw?” his voice rumbled quietly.

“It…” Cade was at a loss for words, and he closed his eyes for a moment, trying to recall what it was he had seen. It had been hidden in the shadows of the insides of Optimus’s chest, but the inside of whatever it was had been illuminated by light. “It looks like a spark but it’s inside something shaped kinda like…” he didn’t know how to explain it so he joined his hands together and then separated them, swooping his left hand upward and the right hand downward. “It’s there in your chest, you gotta know what I’m talking about.”

“I do, in fact,” Optimus’s lipplates shifted upward in a small grin and he separated the plates of his chassis. He reached into the gap in his chassis and pulled the object that Cade had referred to out. He gently tossed it up into the air and Cade watched, transfixed, as it hovered in midair. “Is this what you were referring to?”

“Yeah.” The Texan watched as the orb of light inside it pulsed brightly. “That. What is it?”

“That,” Optimus held up a servo, smiled, and gently moved his servo around, listening to Cade softly gasp and murmur in awe, “would be the Matrix of Leadership. It is an ancient relic of the Primes that came before me; it was used to help them harvest energon from stars, and it also possesses the ability bring a Cybertronian back from death. It was used on me for such purposes, once, many years ago.” Optimus sighed and gently waved his servo toward Cade, pushing the Matrix toward the human. “For now it merely takes up residence inside my chassis.”

“It’s… wow,” Cade reached up and ran the tips of his fingers over the casing of the Matrix as it levitated in front of him. The metal casing, the glowing orb, everything about it was so alien and it fascinated him. He got to his feet so he could run his entire hands over it. “And you carry this with you, all the time?”

“I have carried it with me since Samuel James Witwicky inserted it into my spark chamber and woke me from death.”

“What’s this in the middle? Is it another spark or…?”

“That glowing orb you see is believed to be a remnant of the spark of Primus, our Creator God-”

Cade was known as the screw-up of his family. There was the time that he was five and he knocked over the only TV, rendering his family of six kids unable to watch basic cable for the next year. He had tried fixing it and wound up messing it up further. There was that time he was eleven and he somehow broke his leg falling off a horse. When he was sixteen he wrapped his car around a tree on the short drive from the family home to the grocery store just a block away. At eighteen, he became a dad and missed his graduation for the birth of his daughter (though that was only considered a screw-up by his own parents).

His entire life, full of mistakes. This recent one, his hands slipping and fingers digging into the white-hot orb at the center of the Matrix, was probably going to be his last. He became aware of his entire body heating up, felt like his skin was peeling away, had the sensation of being picked up by some invisible hand.

He heard himself scream. He heard Optimus shout his name.

He was thrown backwards and everything went white for a moment before it all became black and he ceased to feel.

.-.-.

“Cade!”

“Cade Yeager, can you hear us?”

His muscles twitched and he jerked awake, shouting and opening his eyes. Optimus leaned over him, taking up most of his visual field, and a green mech stood on the other side of him with a few tools in his hands.

“No explanation for this, Optimus,” Ratchet murmured, looking up at the Prime and shaking his head. “None at all.”

“Eh… explanation for what?” Cade asked, blinking his eyes and looking around. It was now dawn, the sun coming up over the horizon. He blinked again and struggled to sit up, lifting an arm and gently holding it in front of him. He felt someone gently place a hand on his back and another one on his raised arm. “I touched the thing and it… knocked me out.”

“I saw,” Optimus’s voice said quietly. Cade turned around and looked into the Prime’s blue eyes. “I was worried that the power of the Matrix’s core was too much for you and that it had…” he blinked and sighed.

Cade sighed and drew his legs up to his chest, placing his head in his hands. “I’m fine… I… I think.”

Then it hit him.

His face.

Was touching metal.

Why was his face touching metal?

He jerked his arm away and looked at his hands, which were now completely covered in metal armor. He opened his mouth and felt his heart hammering in his chest. Cade wanted to yell in shock and horror, but nothing came out as he turned around and realized…

Optimus’s hand was on his back

The entire hand.

On his back.

Not just a finger offered to rub his back to soothe him. The entire goddamn thing.

Optimus’s other hand on his arm.

What. In. The. Name. Of God?

He shot to his pedes and choked out a yell, running and stumbling down a hill toward the small lake on his property and ignoring Ratchet and Optimus running and yelling after him, shouting for him to calm down. Cade couldn't think straight, his entire thought process going something along the lines of _whatthefuckingfuck goddammit fuckno what the fucking fuck is going the fuck on WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO ME?!?!_

The lake came into view and he dropped to his hands and knees, hovering over the lake… it looked like a puddle to him now as he looked at his reflection on the surface of the water.

He didn’t stare back. A bot, all metal, black and blue helm with a light grey trim on his collarbones, stared back at him.

What was this?

What the flying fuck was this?

He shook his head and shouted something. Birds flew out of the tree next to the lake, startled by his loud voice.

“Cade, please.”

“Hold still, I need to run further scans on you.”

He sat back on his legs and held his face in his hands, not acknowledging the comforting presence of Optimus and how the Prime gently rubbed his back.

“There’s no… no record of something like this ever happening, Optimus. Nor is there any possible way that we could turn him back into a human immediately.”

“So I’m… goddammit, I’m stuck like this?”

Ratchet sighed and looked down at his scanner. “I’m afraid so.”

Cade felt Optimus’s optics on him. He moved his hands from his face and hung his head, looking back down at the puddle. Blue eyes stared back at him, set within that metal face that _wasn’t his._

“Goddammit.”

“I’m sorry, Cade,” Optimus said in a soft tone, moving his servo from the newly formed Cybertronian’s back. “Ratchet will work on trying to devise a way to return you to your original state, but for now we have no options.”

Cade shook his head. “No… no apologies needed Optimus. I did this to myself. Now the only thing I’m worried about is,” he raised his head and looked at Optimus and Ratchet, “how is Tessa going to react?”


	2. Tessa

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ironhide has also returned; both his and Ratchet's revival will be explained in a later addition to this particular fic series.

She had the windows of the truck open and her blonde hair tied up in a ponytail so it wouldn’t fly in wind as she turned onto the familiar dirt road, heading toward the farmhouse. She smiled at the huge banner she could already see hung across the living room, with crude doodles of Bevo the Longhorn scrawled on the banner next to the words WELCOME HOME TESSA!

First year at the University of Texas at Austin finished with. She was still in her basics and unsure of what to major in, though her College Algebra course in the fall had actually been extremely simple for her. Well… as simple as it could get for college at UT. Math had always been one of her stronger suits, now that she looked back at her grades in school.

Tessa pulled her blue Silverado into the garage, parking it next to her dad’s black one, and stepped off it. She glanced at the boxes and containers in the backbed and shrugged; she’d unload them later. The important stuff, her laptop and purse and two suitcases containing her clothes, were in the backseat of the extended cab. She pulled them out and locked the truck, walking into the house. “Dad! I’m home!”

Her voice echoed in the house. She leaned her suitcases against the kitchen island and dumped her laptop bag and purse on the chairs, fetching a water from the fridge.

That was odd; why wasn’t her dad coming down the stairs?

She furrowed her brows in concern and walked into the living room. The welcome home banner was up just as she’d expected, but there was no one else around. “Dad?”

Nothing. It was quiet. She heard her laptop bag tip over from its standing position to a laying position.

“Dad?”

She raced up the stairs, toward her dad’s room. The door was left ajar so she stepped in. The covers on the bed were messy; her dad was a strange one in that he insisted on making his bed each morning, so this was a tad worrisome.

He had to be out in the barn, slumped over a table and sleeping because he had some crazy idea for an invention in the middle of the night.

Tessa made her way back down the stairs and through the front door, heading for the barn and shouting, “Dad! Are you out here?!”

Her voice was carried away in the Texas wind and she thought for a moment that she’d have to march up to the door and bang her fists on it until a rumbling and deep voice met her ears. “It’s good to see you back, Tessa Yeager.”

“Oh!” Tessa turned around and got an eyeful of giant robot with bright blue eyes looking down at her. “Hi Optimus, I didn’t see you when I came in.” She placed her hands on her hips and smiled up at the family Autobot guardian. “Has my dad been around?”

“He has been, yes.”

“Well, where is he, ‘cause he’s not in the house.” She turned around and resumed her walk toward the barn as she said, “Did he come out here last night and fall asleep in the barn or something? He’s not in the house and I just-”

“Tessa.”

There was an edge to Optimus’s voice that she picked up on and that she didn’t like. She stopped in her tracks, closed her eyes, then turned around and reopened them, staring up at giant sentient robot from another planet. “What is it?” she asked with a hesitant tone to her voice.

“I… I feel it would be best to show you but I will preface this by saying that an accident occurred.”

Tessa’s eyes widened and her mouth dropped open in horror. “An _accident_? Oh my God! Is my dad-”

“He is perfectly fine, but I…” Optimus thinned his lipplates and dimmed his optics, unsure of how to continue telling her. He sighed and gestured with his helm for her to follow him.

The girl held a hand to her forehead and placed the other over her chest to steady herself, doing her best not to let her imagination and anxiousness and fear get the best of her as her mind conjured images of her dad and scenarios that Optimus could be leading her toward. Optimus said her dad was perfectly fine and Optimus couldn’t be lying… could he?

He led her around the house to the backyard and the fields behind it. A little ways away she saw Ratchet throwing a wrench at a black mech whose name she couldn’t remember.

“I told you not to go to harsh on him Ironhide!”

Ironhide snorted derisively and crossed his arms over his chassis, glaring at his mate. “Well, he’s gotta learn doesn’t he Ratch?”

“Yes, but not at the speed you’re putting him through!” Ratchet threw his hands up and sighed, “For Primus’s sake Ironhide, this isn’t Cybertron boot camp when the war began!”

“If ya think that’s bad you don’t want to see how I really drilled everyone in camp.”

“You both,” Optimus cut into the conversation, giving both mechs pointed looks. “Where is Cade?”

Before either Ratchet or Ironhide could answer, another voice answered from somewhere between Ironhide and Ratchet. Tessa looked down and laid her eyes on a black and blue mech seated in the Texas grass, head hung and staring at the ground. “Here, Optimus.”

“Cade,” Optimus softened his voice and gaze, “Tessa is here.”

The bot looked up and at the small human next to the Autobot leader. Tessa clenched her hands into fists as she looked at this bot. Optimus had called him Cade. What?

“Tessa,” the bot said, voice broken, her name hanging in the air. “Good to see you home.”

Tessa turned and ran for the front of the house, resisting the urge to scream. What the fuck was this?!

“Dad!”

“Tessa, I’m out here!”

“You’re not my dad!” she hollered to the voice outside as she entered the house and bounded up the stairs in a frenzy, heading for her dad’s bedroom and nearly tearing the room apart, shoving the chair away from the desk and slamming the closet doors open. “You’re NOT my dad! Dad, where are you, get out here!”

“T-Tessa, I’m here, goddammit!”

Tessa stormed out of the closet, having thrown almost all the clothes to the floor in the hopes that she’d find her dad crouched behind them and laughing, like he would when she found him in hide-and-seek. She kicked away a nightstand, getting papers everywhere and the cordless lamp miraculously flying onto the bed. “DAD! DAD WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?!”

“Tessa Lynn Yeager, WILL YOU LISTEN TO ME?!”

The sound of her birth name being yelled out in the open made her stop in her tracks. The strange bot was hovering in her eyesight, outside one of the big windows of her dad’s room. Over his shoulder she could see Optimus right behind him, placing a servo on his back and murmuring something to him in that deep voice of his. She placed her hands to her hips and glared at the bot, apparently named Cade, eyes meeting his. He closed his own eyes and reopened them, staring at her.

It was a tense few moments that passed, all the while Tessa stared at the bot with her hands on her hips and mouth set in a line.

Cade sighed. “Tessa Lynn Yeager. Your birthday is June 9th, 1996, the day and year Lynn Moore and I were supposed to graduate high school but instead of being at Wildcat Stadium for graduation we were at Paris Regional Medical Center. You went to Givens for prekinder, Aikin for kinder through fourth, Crockett for fifth and sixth, Paris Junior for seventh and eighth, and you graduated Paris High last year.”

“You could look that up on the internet,” Tessa said, mouth pursed. For a moment, Cade thought she looked like her mom. “My birthday, the schools,” she huffed and grabbed the bed frame, pushing it in hopes that her dad might come up from under there, “you can look that stuff up. There’s records and all that-”

“Your first crush was at Aikin, on a boy named Ryan Gomez. You came home and said you liked him and I said “Don’t even think about it,” and your mom just smiled and asked you to tell her more about him.”

Tessa remembered Ryan; olive-skinned boy with a mop of thick black hair and gray eyes. He always wore a green shirt and jeans with white sneakers that were dirt-brown by the second week of her first grade year. She removed her hands from the bedframe as the bot continued, “He moved away at the end of first grade and you cried for days after that.”

“What did you and mom get me to get me to stop crying about Ryan?”

“A dog and a cat.”

“What kind were they and what were their names?”

The bot’s eyes flickered down and some of the metal on his face shifted, as if he were thinking deeply about something. “German Shepherd. You named her Princess, and the cat was a Maine Coon or some huge fluffy breed like that, and you called him Furry.”

“Did they get along?”

“There’s a picture in the photo album of you sitting next to Princess, and she’s laying on the ground and Furry’s sitting on Princess’s back.”

Tessa walked over to the window and placed her hands on the windowsill, coming near face-to-face with the black and blue bot. “What happened to Princess and Furry?”

“We had to put Princess down when you were in eighth grade because they found tumors. Furry ran away a year later when you were in ninth grade.”

She tapped her fingers on the white paint of the windowsill, staring expectantly at the bot.

Cade stared at his daughter, torn on what else he could say to fully convince her that he wasn’t just some strange Cybertronian but really her dad. He sighed and placed a hand to his forehelm, feeling Optimus’s hand come up from his back to rest on his shoulder. “Lynn died a month after you turned nine. If I had had a steady job with health insurance and all that, she probably would have gone to the doctor earlier and they could have started chemo, removed her ovaries, something to beat that bullshit back.” He looked down at the ground and he noted how the air had changed. Optimus’s presence was comforting for some reason he couldn’t exactly decipher, but he filed that thought away for another time. “You spent all your birthday money on getting Lynn a pretty blue dog plush toy and she was buried with it. Everyone wore black at the funeral but Lynn asked me to put you in the light pink and blue dress you had worn at Easter that year, so I did.”

Tessa turned around, back facing the bot. Her hands shook and she had to tell herself to calm down. They were still shaking when she brought them up to wipe the tears away from her eyes; mom was always a touchy subject. She faced out the window again and gripped the windowsill again, steadying her hands. She sighed. “How did this happen? How did you get all…” she absently waved at his new frame, “all robot, dad?”

Cade chuckled quietly and made a noise of uncertainty, placing a hand on the back of his neck. “I’m not even sure, Tess. It’s… you tell her,” he looked back at the red and blue Autobot behind him.

Optimus gave a minute nod before looking at the blonde woman in the window. He parted his chestplates and something levitated out, a strange device with a glowing ball in it. It hung in midair, literally, and her eyes stayed on it as Optimus spoke.

“Last night Cade asked me about this relic that I keep in my chassis at all times, called the Matrix of Leadership. I brought it out and allowed him to place his hands on it, and unfortunately…”

“Unfortunately what?”

“He placed his hands on the Matrix and it blew him back, throwing him onto the ground. He convulsed violently before my optics and I was about to communicate with human emergency medical services. I looked away for one moment and when I looked back,” Optimus removed his servo from Cade’s hunched shoulder strut, “he had taken on this form.”

Tessa stared at the hovering Matrix, whatever it was that Optimus had called it, before she looked at her dad. One would think that someone gone robot would look pretty majestic, but in her eyes, he still looked like the defeated and broken man he’d been since her mom had died and left her to take care of him. She groaned, closed her eyes, shook her head, and reopened her eyes. “Can he be turned back? Into a human?”

_Into my dad?_

Her heart sank to her feet when Optimus didn’t nod or shake his head. His huge and broad chest expanded then retracted as he sighed. “I’m afraid that I cannot give you an answer, Tessa Yeager. Ratchet has been performing tests on Cade since his transformation but even he is at a loss. He will attempt to devise a way to allow Cade to revert back to his original form but for now he will have to stay as such.”

Tessa thinned her lips and placed her hands over her eyes, pressing them against her eyes until she saw stars. God, this couldn’t be happening. This was fucking ridiculous.

“I’m going to go take a nap. Can’t deal with this right now.”

Cade nodded and Optimus gently tilted his head to the side and nodded once. She turned around and walked away from the window, opening and closing her hands. As she left her dad’s room, all in disarray, she heard her dad’s voice tell her, “I love you Tess. I’m sorry.”

When she reached her room she leaned out of the window and called out, “I love you too dad.” With that, she collapsed on her bed, curling into the pillows and hugging them to her chest. She could have sworn she felt a familiar presence outside her windows, but she was too tired to give it much thought. Shane and her friends were throwing a welcome home party for her at his house later on. She was glad it wasn’t at her house instead.

She’d have to find out a way to tell her boyfriend and friends that her weirdo inventor, ex-football player dad was now a giant robot.


End file.
